|
|
Xtri Chats with Green Athlete Chris Lieto
By Betsy Delcour
5/12/2008 |
|
|
Xtri recently had the chance to sit down and chat with Chris Lieto. Fittingly, it was Earth Day when we spoke! In addition to being one of the top triathletes in America, not only in long course but also sprints and Olympic distance, Chris is highly dedicated to giving back to programs benefitting the earth and those in need. Plus he's started his own nutrition company on top of all of that! Here's what Chris had to say about racing, being a dad, his relationship with K-Swiss, how we can help our planet and more...
I just read your report about the Sea Otter Classic! That sounds pretty cool. You don’t hear about many triathletes really doing the cycling stage races like you do. That’s kind of unique I think. Or am I wrong – do you know of others?
You know I’ve been doing it for 3 or 4 years now, and since then it seems that more and more people are getting into it. I don’t know if it’s because of my presence in it. But I’ve noticed that more triathletes are doing crossover and there’s a couple pros who have done it. I mean Steve Larsen for example, he did it, but he started on road and went to triathlon. There’s a couple of people that do some road races on the side, but none that do stage races or are set up with a team. I was lucky, I got hooked up with a really good team and I ride well in the stage races and I find that it’s really good training for me for triathlons, IM, stuff like that. I’ve done the Tour of Utah, Mt. Hood, Cascade Classic a couple of times. Sea Otter I just did the one day road race to train for Wildflower, but I’ve got some other stage races coming up this year. It’s fun, it breaks up the monotony, and I find I work a lot harder. The report I wrote about Sea Otter, if I had done that workout at home, I would have gotten probably 1/10 of the effort in the workout I got going there and doing it. Cause I ended up pulling and being up front for much of the race; when you have people behind you in a race situation you tend to forget about how it feels to go hard, and you just go hard. I find that it helps me in my training.
And then just looking at your schedule this year, the only IM you have planned is Kona, and then you’re mixing it up with some 70.3 races and shorter distance races. Is this a new strategy for you?
No, last year I didn’t do any other IM but Hawaii. I thought about doing an IM again this year, but just with the demand of what an IM takes and the recovery time, and also the fact that I’m getting older, my recovery times have slowed down a little bit. I just thought, you know, I’m at the stage in my career where Hawaii is the next goal for me. So that’s where I want to put my focus. It seemed to work out well for me last year, it gives me opp to do more racing, whereas if I was doing an IM I wouldn’t be able to do as much racing and I love to race and be out there with my peers and challenge myself. It gives me a chance to do more 70.3 races and some shorter races.
Yeah, it’s pretty cool seeing how you did in those two races in Miami! You did pretty well winning the Nautica South Beach race and getting third in the Miami International race...
Yeah, Matt Reed beat me by 20 seconds or something, so it was a good race! Matt just qualified for the Olympic team so that makes me feel good. I beat Fleischman and a few other guys that were at the Olympic trials; I would have loved to try for the trials but with all the criteria and the qualifications that they need, I was unable to.
It shows you definitely have a pretty good range for everything from a sprint triathlon to IM, and doing well at all distances...
Well thank you! Like I said, I like to race. And it’s fun, the Olympic distance and sprints, I look at as training. A way to go out and train and have a hard effort, similar to what I do with cycling. You know, you do a cycling race and it doesn’t tear you up where you can’t train two days later. Whereas if you do a triathlon like a half ironman you have to take a week or 3 or 4 days till you can train. So doing an Olympic distance or sprint distance allows me to get that practice in and still have time to train through it.
So if you use those shorter races as training, does that mean you don’t do any type of taper to get ready for them?
No, I don’t taper I just kind of go right into it. You know, a day or two before I’ll lessen the load. But before the sprint race in Miami, I did an almost 3 hour ride the day prior. And it’ll be the same with Olympic distance races too. I’ll continue on with my training but 2 days before I might take an easy day. Primarily everything else will stay the same.
So can you tell us what Kona was like for you this past year? You led for so much of the bike and then on the run too. Can you kind of walk us through what it was like for you, and how you feel set up for this coming year?
For me it was a great experience, and it was pretty fun to be out there and be in the lead. I’m the type of person that sets goals for myself and believes that I can accomplish what I set in front of me, so I went out to Kona believing that I had a chance to win. So I raced it as if I was racing to win. For me that meant trying to be in the front and racing my own race, and really challenging myself on the bike course. Knowing that I can’t at this point out run some of the top guys, but I know where it’s at and I was within my element riding, and it’s fun being in the front. I tried to not focus on that while I was there, not get caught up in where you’re at and the excitement of it or the pressures of it, and just kind of treated it as a normal race. So I acknowledged that I was in the front but I didn’t let it get to me. But yeah, it was an honor to be out there, and it was fun!
And then in the run, it was kind of the same thing. Just focusing on what I had to do and the job that was in front of me. I knew that I was slowing down a little, and had some issues and some stomach thing going on. Chris McCormack caught me at mile 16 or somewhere around there, and you know at that point it was a decision I made to try and run with Chris. It was me, having the mindset of “I’m here to win, I’m not here hoping to get third place or fourth place.” It was probably...I would say it was a mistake – looking back, I don’t regret what I did or the choice that I made running with him. But I think potentially it could have set me back, getting 6th place, when potentially I could have gotten third. My goal was to try to push myself, and try to win, try to crack Chris McCormack. You know in the run, if mentally I could have gotten to him. You never know – anyone can have a bad day and it can happen at any time. I wanted to be there in case something happened and he faltered for a moment, I would have been there to run past.
Right, and you can’t have any regrets when you’ve done your best, and you’ve tried your best...
Exactly! And I mean if I rode differently or raced differently, I’d look back and regret it going ‘I wonder how I would have done if I tried this or tried that.” I really put everything out there and that’s all I could do. So I was definitely happy with it.
With today being Earth Day, I’ve seen on your website the Green Athlete, and all of the different projects you’re involved in. Can you tell us about them?
The Green Athlete is a campaign I have launched this year with the help of some of my sponsors. The campaign provides resources and ideas that support athletes in their effort to live green. A core component of the campaign, The Green Athlete Blog, provides weekly tips that cover everything from where to recycle your running shoes to what food choices will help make a difference. I decided to do the program this year because my goal in racing and whatever I do, racing or business, is trying to make an impact or difference in where I’m at and what I’m doing. So when I leave the sport of triathlon, I don’t want to just be another athlete that participated in the sport and then left, and that’s it. I want to contribute to the sport, I want to make a difference. I don’t want my time in the sport to be wasted. We race for ourselves, and it’s for self-indulgence, or a sense of accomplishment, or for whatever our goals may be when we race. But by adding something to it, for me now it’s racing to do something different, it’s racing to build awareness. And so the Green Athlete is not a project about me being the perfect green person, but it’s just about building awareness. To take a position in what I’m doing to educate people on the little things they can do in their lives, in their racing, stuff that can help lessen the impact that we make on the environment. So I have a big rig, as I like to call it...
I saw the picture of it – it’s hysterical!
Yeah, it’s a pretty big rig! It’s a big Ford Van that’s been converted; it’s 4 wheel drive, 35 inch tires, it’s got a big lift kit on it, it’s a full camper inside – kitchen, sleeps four, it’s all run on biodiesel and everything inside it is run on solar. And I’m driving to the majority of my races instead of flying, so by doing that I’m lessening an impact, but also the van will be at each race. Like at Wildflower, I’m encouraging people to come by and visit the van, because what we want to do is set up camp and open the doors to talk to people. A lot of times people feel that professional athletes are hard to connect with or talk with, or feel intimidated. I have no problem, I love to talk to people and be social, as long as I have a place to put my feet up prior to a race and I have my food and have my necessities, then I’m fine doing that. So I want to be in an environment where we have chairs set up, we have an awning, it’s a place to hang out and talk about racing, talk about training, nutrition, talk about solar energy, recycling, and what we can do for the whole Green Athlete campaign. And so part of that is we have a big flat screen tv, we have play station, so you can come and play video games, we’ll have a coffee machine so people can come and get coffee at our van, and so we want to make it a cool hang-out environment so people can come and be social and to learn and educate about how we can make a difference.
So the TV and coffee maker and everything – they’re solar powered too?
Yeah – everything that’s run out of the van, the TV, Playstation, coffee maker, the refrigerator, kitchen – whatever else we choose to run out of the van is all run on solar. And that’s just to show people how easy it is to run solar, and how beneficial it is and how much power it can produce, and that goes into Sungevity. Their company actually launched today, and it’s an online solar company where you can go online, plug in your address and they can send you a quote. And they eliminate the headache of getting solar; they wanted to make the process of finding out about solar and getting solar installed in your house as easy and simple as possible. The cost, the breaking point, the profit point – basically if you put solar, how long it takes for you to start making money on it, and also it’s just a very easy process. And they’re the wave of the future, with solar and installation. It makes it cheap and a streamlined situation for people to get what they need. So it’s pretty cool...
That’s great. And for the time being, Sungevity is just available in CA?
Yes, for the time being it’s just in CA but it will be expanding outside pretty quickly. I think they’re going to move into other states pretty quick. You know, CA was the focus because the people here are so focused on green and everything. But as soon as certain states – there are just certain channels they need to go through for other states. They’re already getting a huge response and they just launched today. There was an early release week, where we leaked something out last week, and they’ve already gotten a huge amount of traffic.
Great! How about Soles 4 Souls?
I’m the official spokesperson for Soles 4 Souls, it’s a non-profit organization that recycles or collects used shoes and what we’re doing is I lined them up with K-Swiss who’s very green in their own right. They have solar buildings, and their owner drives a Prius, so they’re very focused on that. But I helped align them with utilizing recycled old shoes. So we partnered up K-Swiss and Soles 4 Souls, so all the events that we go to we’re going to collect used shoes. At Wildflower we encourage people to bring old used shoes that they don’t use any more. If the shoes are too worn out, where someone can’t use them, they recycle them into turf or track material. There’s over 300 million kids who do not have shoes in the world. And there’s 1.5 billion unworn shoes in America’s closets today – so there’s a lot of shoes that are not being worn, they’re just sitting there. So what we’re doing is we’re encouraging people to bring their shoes in and we’ll recycle them. They can either bring them to an event where there’s a collection or they can go to the website and just mail them in, there’s a process they can go through. And then K-Swiss will give a coupon to discount a new pair of shoes. So that lines them up together. But it’s a great thing for the needy people out there who don’t have shoes. They started first with the tsunami that hit Southeast Asia and then Katrina. There were a lot of people who did not have shoes after those incidents, so this is just filling a need that’s out there. And we can be pretty wasteful with our shoes, especially me being a professional athlete. I run on my shoes until they’re just a little bit worn out, then I go to the next pair; but they’re still great for walking around and for most people to run in for that matter. But for me, I want to do something with those shoes.
The next business I’m involved with is Base Performance Nutrition. Through racing, and being in the sport for over 10 years now, I have a passion for nutrition and health as well as a lot of things outside of that. Every time, I learn a lot about my body, what I eat, what supplements I take and what my body needs to function. And I realized there was a whole in the market. There was a need for foundational health. And Base Performance is about focusing on our base health, like we do with our base training. If you have good foundational health, then your performance will increase and you’ll have a better performance level. I aligned myself with doctors and scientists who I worked with throughout my career, and we started working on product over two years ago. And I developed the product – the two that are out currently are products I’ve been developing and utilizing for two years now. And have found success with them; I wouldn’t launch the product unless I realized it did everything it’s supposed to and worked. After 2 years of working on it and finding the benefits – for example Kona last year, all of the products I used were Base products – and finally came out with it and launched it about a month ago. And the first two products are Base Amino and Base Water. Basically I used Base water in every bottle I used in Kona; it helps transfer the water into your cells. It makes it so you hydrate quicker and more efficiently. In clinical trials it’s 8 times quicker than any other liquids out there. And Base Amino – I didn’t want to come up with a new drink, I wanted to come up with an additive to allow people to continue using their own sports drink. So I add Amino to it – I still use PowerBar for my sports drink, and I add Base Amino to it so I can get a ratio of protein – aminos are used for fuel, and if you don’t have amino acids available in your system your body breaks down muscle tissue to draw amino acids out for fuel. So it helps sustain your performance, and energy, and it helps with your recovery during training. So I recover quicker, I perform better...
Is this going to be mainly an online product, or are you getting into any retailers?
Some retailers are carrying it currently – very few – I’ve been selective in going into retailers. For one, I want to build the brand, and without brand being built it will just sit in a retail center and not be sold. So right now our goal for the next 6 months to 1 year is to just to focus on online sales and build our brand and educate people about it and the benefits of it. So people can buy it online through our website, and again there will be select retailers scattered about. But for the most part it will just be available online.
Can you talk to us about K-Swiss and how you got involved with them?
Yeah! K-Swiss gave me a call about a year ago and as you know, they’ve been around for years. And in the past they’ve been in tennis, and hip hop with the whole white clunky shoe thing, and they decided to go back to their roots, which is sport. So they hired a bunch of people from different companies and basically got the best of the best in the shoe business and brought them to K-Swiss. And it’s almost like a startup company within an established company because it’s in its own arena again, going into running and tennis and really focusing on that. And instead of going straight into running they wanted to do triathlon so they gave me a call and we hit off really well and I’ve been working with them helping them create the running shoe. They came to me with a shoe, and I’d be a wear tester and tell them what I looked for in a shoe and what I need, they’d make a new sample and I’d run in that, tell them how it felt, and how it ran, and we’d just build a shoe from there. So it’s been fun for me to be involved with the company not just as a representative and having their name on my jersey, but being part of the family and help creating the product, and they’re really focused on being involved in triathlon for the long-term and making a difference in the sport, so it’s fun to be aligned with someone like that.
And it’s really a tri-specific shoe?
I mean the first shoe to come out, the Ultra Natural, is more designed for a triathlete because it comes with elastic races, there aren’t any seams on the inside so you can run in it barefoot, it’s got a water channel so the water comes out at the bottom of the shoe. But a lot of runners run in it too. It’s just a great running shoe. It’s very minimal, there’s no posting to it, because you don’t need it. I used to pronate a lot and would wear a posted shoe, I run in this shoe and I don’t need a post. The way it tracks and the way the shoe’s built – it’s not a supportive shoe but it helps your feet and your body run the way it’s supposed to, like you’re running barefoot to a certain extent. It also gives the cushion that your feet need. They’re also coming out with three new shoes in the next month, and some new racing shoes are coming out later this year which I’m also excited about down the line as well. Some great products, really great shoes, great clothing, apparel as far as triathlon gear, so I’m really looking forward to the growth of the company for the next few years.
So you’re going to be a part of the continuation of the products that they’re designing – you’ll be able to keep your voice in that?
Yeah, they’re really cool in that they really want my opinion, and they really want to hear what I like and don’t like about certain things. So it’s just really cool to be with someone that wants to hear your voice instead of “we have a deadline and we have product that needs to go out. Hope you like it!” Instead it’s like “ok, here’s the product that we think is going to work – what do you think?” And I make comments or adjustments on it, and they’ll change it. So they want to come out in the beginning with products that really work and have the voice of an athlete, not just a corporate company.
Very Cool. So moving right along you have a wife, Karis and a son Kaiden. Since you have that monster van, do they get to travel with you to your races?
Um, my wife is also pregnant...
Oh! How many months along is she?!
Well we’re expect a girl in the beginning of August!
Congratulations! So a boy and a girl...
Yeah. Right now my wife does not like to go in the van because she has a hard enough time sleeping at home in a normal bed! She’s like “I don’t wanna sleep in that thing!” Haha! So Kaiden loves it, he wants to go anywhere I go in it right now, it’s like a big playhouse for him.
Yeah, I can imagine it’s like a little boy’s dream!
Yeah exactly! So he’ll be at some races with me, he’ll travel a little bit with me. But my wife works still, so she’ll be at home for some events. But she’ll be at Wildflower and will fly to some events like Hawaii of course.
So how is it for you balancing family life and training?
Ah, it’s always a challenge! I’m still learning how to balance it as best I can. And on an easy day if something comes up with my son, to not worry about getting that session in, as long as it’s not a critical session. So to not live and die by my training schedule but to follow the flow of it, and the intent of the training schedule. So I try to find balance with that, also it’s my full-time job so I get to spend the mornings with my sons, then I get to go and train and just hang out for a while – so I’m in and out of the house and I get to see him quite a bit. Yeah, I’m looking forward I guess to when I retire and I get to spend some more time with him. But yeah it’s an on-going challenge for sure!
For more about chris, visit www.chrislieto.com.
Photos
1. Chris Lieto
2. Staying hydrated in Kona, 2007
3. Devastating the field on the bike
4. The Big Rig
|
| Back to Listings |
|
